


i will plant a garden green

by spacenarwhal



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Post-Canon, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 11:27:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4744577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacenarwhal/pseuds/spacenarwhal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Will you still be the Dag?” Cheedo asks, barely audible over the roar of the engine eating its way over the red desert flats.<br/>The Dag laughs, a watery, mad sound she can’t keep in, “Who else would I be?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	i will plant a garden green

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: In this story the Dag is still pregnant with the baby she conceived after being raped by Immortan Joe.

“Cheedo the Brave.” The Dag dubs her as the rocks fall behind them, barring the war rigs and the pups and the ugly, filthy men like old Joe who aren’t even worth the spit on her cracked lips. She presses a kiss to Cheedo’s trembling shoulder, their hands clasped together on the Dag’s lap, so close the bones grind together but for the thin skin keeping them apart. “Cheedo the Strong.”

Cheedo’s fingers squeeze so hard that the Dag imagines her bones cracking, splitting open like salt fields under the unrelenting sun. “Will you still be the Dag?” Cheedo asks, barely audible over the roar of the engine eating its way over the red desert flats.

The Dag laughs, a watery, mad sound she can’t keep in, “Who else would I be?”

Cheedo shrugs, rests her head against the Dags, her words a sigh, “Whoever you’d like.”

-

Toast takes to the armories, trains with Furiosa in the ways of guns and rigs, and Capable to the Wretched, to the thirsty tired people scrabbling in the dirt. Cheedo wanders between them, helps with inventories and distributes water, come to the Dag with cracked blistered hands and sunburnt shoulders. Donah, who drove the warhorse to the citadel, shows her which plants to grind into a poultice, and Cheedo’s shoulders wiggle when the Dag dabbles it on with her crooked fingers.

The Dag and the remaining Vuvalini build their garden, choose seeds carefully and push them into soil reeking with fertilizer. The Dag cups her hands over each newly buried hope and whispers a prayer, turns her wrists and offers her prayers to the sky. She imagines the Keeper of Seeds listening to her, watching their progress. The Dag asks for her blessing with dirt beneath her fingernails.

-

Her seedling grows, and she imagines something green, like the little leaves that spout out of the damp earth. It is less frightening to think of it that way. Cheedo touches her hands to the rounding curve of her belly, palms flat like she might cradle a bowl, brows pinching. She hadn’t shown much interest in Splendid’s stomach when she’d begun showing, seemed to curl into herself tighter the bigger Splendid grew. But maybe it was not the baby Cheedo had been afraid of, maybe it had been Splendid’s anger, the cold determination with which she cut her face and said, “We are not things.”

Splendid had promised the baby would be beautiful and brave but sometimes the Dag still feels the weight of her fear in the bottom of her stomach, building and building until she’s doubled over gagging on bile. Cheedo braids the Dag’s hair tight and brings her the tea Miss Giddy once made Splendid drink, but it’s just hot water down the Dag’s throat. (How many wives before her, before them, how many children buried in the same dirty they till to make new things grow?)

Cheedo presses a single kiss just north of the Dag’s navel (they don’t dress in tatters anymore, but the Dag would recognize the brand of Cheedo’s lips through anything). When she smiles at the Dag, it is small but unafraid, different out in the sunlight than it ever looked in the vault room. The Dag wants to memorize it, trace the curl of it with her worry-bitten fingers.

“You’ll teach her to grow things.” Cheedo says, with her simple smile, but her eyes are full of faraway lights, shining overhead in the night sky (old souls her Mam had said long ago, when she’d taught the Dag to pray). “And she’ll make the world a green place.”

-

“Do you think people can belong to each other and to themselves?” Cheedo asks at the table they share with Toast and Capable, plates smaller than they once were but they all feel fuller, heartier, knowing there are more mouths fed now.

Toast snorts, picks at the grease dried on her hands, “Don’t think it works that way.”

Capable shrugs, mouth a thoughtful dip, “Maybe.” There’s a tender red spot on the inside of her wrist, black script inflamed over her pulse point, the way Miss Giddy used to the write the names of those who came in and out of her care on her body so that someone would remember.

Cheedo worries her hands, picks at a sunburn on her forearm that’s begun to peel. Her skin is the color of dried clay from long hours in the sunlight. The Dag rests her hands on her belly, earns Toast’s eyes, sharp and almost-frightened (Toast had cut her hair with a stolen shard of glass, left it in wispy clouds on the floor for Joe to find. Toast does not look at the Dag’s stomach, does not talk about what the baby inside might become. The Dag envies her).

“Maybe,” she echoes, planting her feet firmly on the ground beneath the table. She curls her toes inside her boots and imagines digging roots, entrenching herself in this place, this time, beneath and around and over these women. “Maybe.”

-

There is a cracked seed in one of the bottles. She takes it and a palm-full of dirt, spills it into a chipped bowl and carries it carefully to the room she shares with Cheedo, small and untidy, cluttered with the cloth dolls the Dag makes in her spare time, their eyes pressed in by her dirt-smeared thumb, to make up for the one Cheedo left behind when they left and cannot bring herself to reclaim.

“Will it grow?” Cheedo asks, peering into the bowl after the Dag has placed it on the windowsill. The Dag shrugs. “We’ll wait.” So they do.

-

They’re called Sisters now, since they would not allow themselves to be named Widows. They have lost no husband, only a warlord. Only a liar. Only a thief who took what was never his to have.

“Can we be wives still?” Cheedo asks quietly, face half-hidden in the Dag’s shoulder. There are two beds in the room but they lie together in one, close from shoulder to hip to ankle bone. The Dag gets bigger and worries that they’ll have to sleep apart before long, but for now Cheedo turns on her side, offers more space for the Dag to fill, and they’re together still. “But only the two of us. I will be your wife and you will be mine.”

No one has ever asked the Dag before if she would like to be a wife.

(“We don’t belong here,” the Dag had told her when the time had come to escape, “You don’t belong to him.” “Will I belong to you?” Cheedo had asked, quiet and afraid, and the Dag had shaken her head, no, “You’ll belong to yourself.” The idea had felt as inconceivable as Furiosa’s green place but the Dag had needed to believe it with everything inside her.)

She is very young still, Cheedo, though her count of days is already six times in the thousands. Perhaps she is young enough still that the word wife is not poison, young enough that it can a mean something more than prisoner or cattle, that it can be sweet as the words in books written by long dead men and women promised.

Love is not a word the Dag knew before she read it in a book, but she could feel it before she knew there was a name for it at all. She feels it still. For the memory of Angharad, for Toast and her terseness, for Capable and her steady hands, for Donah and the other Vuvalini and the plants they tend together. For Furiosa who freed them and Miss Giddy who taught the Dag to write her name on her skin. For Max the Madman wherever he is now. For Cheedo the Fragile and Cheedo the Brave and Cheedo the Woman, who kneels besides the Dag in the dirt and tells the Dag stories about growing things.

Perhaps they can be wives still, remake the word after their own image. Cheedo the Young will make it so.

She does not sound young now, with her mouth soft against the Dag’s shoulder, her palm careful at the Dag’s hip. She sounds sure. The Dag nods, turns her face into Cheedo’s dark hair. The Dag covers the hand on her hip, laces their fingers together, Cheedo smile curves into the Dag’s skin.

-

Cheedo braids strips of cloth the colors of the horizon, soft to the touch, presents it to the Dag with a timid smile. “If you’d like?” She offers, and the Dag offers her arm with a grin, let’s Cheedo fasten it around her wrist. She braids a lock of her hair tight, cuts it with the sharp edge of the knife she keeps in her boot. “If you’d like?” The Dag offers in return and Cheedo’s smile could power the citadel, could charge a generator, fills the Dag with enough light she thinks she’ll outmatch the sun.

The Dag turns Cheedo’s palm over when she’s done, kisses the heart of it. Cheedo takes her by surprise when she cups her face, pulls her straight so that their faces are level. Cheedo’s mouth is dry, sun and sweat, but the touch is the softest thing the Dag has ever known. Love is its own kind of fear, the Dag knows this, but they can choose it for themselves.

-

The baby is born painful and ugly and squawking. When it breathes there is a rattle to the sound and the Dag wants to hide her face, wants to close her eyes and turn away even as Cheeky cleans its mouth with a ruthless finger. She doesn’t.

She feels gutted, all her insides scrambled and bruised and broken, and she cries—she hates to cry, so much salt in the world already—locks her arms around herself like it will help keep her together. Cheedo’s arms come around her from behind, rest over her battered body, warm and brown and strong, the Dag’s hair wound around her bird-bone wrist.

Toast, who spent the delivery alternating between pacing like a hutched-animal and squeezing the Dag’s hand while she screamed, comes to her bedside, takes her hand up one more time in her calloused grip.

“She’s not his,” Toast bites out in her ear, “She’s ours. She’s yours. She’s herself. She’ll never be his.” Repeats the words in her ear over and over like a prayer. Capable takes the baby from Cheeky, swaddled in clean linens, and places her on the Dag’s chest. “One of many mothers.” Cheeky says, face solemn but her eyes damp, excuses herself to tell the others waiting outside the news.

Cheedo’s arms support hers as she studies the baby (nose and mouth and clenched-shut eyes, red, red, and wailing in the Dag’s tired arms).

“She’s ours.” The Dag whispers, touching one crooked finger to the baby’s cheek. It is the softest thing she’s ever touched.

-

Flora grows, plants roots in the home they build for her, the Dag and Cheedo and Toast and Capable and Furiosa and Donah and Cheeky and all the others who died to give them this chance.

They grow and they grow and they grow, over and under and around one another.

**Author's Note:**

> Having just rewatched this movie for the first time since theaters I was completely overwhelmed by the desire to tell a story about the Dag, and then it became a story about Cheedo and the Dag. And then it became this. 
> 
> I named two of the nameless Vuvalini, Donah and Cheeky, which, if Google didn't lie to me, are both Australian terms for 'girl' and 'bold/smart-alecky' respectively. 
> 
> Title from the children's song by the same name.


End file.
